Pinterest Project Fail

Until now, I’ve had success with projects found and tried on Pinterest. Recipes, craft projects, classroom ideas, they’ve all worked out pretty well.

Yesterday I was shopping, and one of my purchases was a new scarf. While I was looking around Pinterest for different ways to tie a scarf I also found a tutorial on making your own scarf out of an old t-shirt. It looked cute and I actually had a couple of perfect candidates for this project in my pile of can’t-throw-out-but-maybe-can-refashion clothes. I had two long-sleeved t-shirts that I just never wore. One was striped and one a coordinating solid color. I thought it would add a little interest to combine them in the same scarf.

The tutorial:

My raw materials:

The directions were pretty simple. Use paper plates as a template to cut circles out of the t-shirts. Then cut the circles into a spiral, pull them a little to stretch and get the “curl,” then just gather all the strips together and wear as a scarf. I’m not sure at what step, but this project went very, very wrong. The strips didn’t really curl up when I stretched them, so when I put the “scarf” around my neck and looked in the mirror, instead of a cute fluffy ruffle-y scarf, it looked like I had a bunch of stringy rags around my neck. It reminded me of the website Cake Wrecks, when they post pictures of the cakes people ordered along with pictures of the cake they actually received:

Click picture to see Cake Wrecks site…hilarious!

Then I started thinking of ways to salvage my shredded strips. I had twelve, so I thought maybe I could braid them together. So I braided sets of three strips together, and then took those four braids and braided them together. The only good thing about this project was that I learned how to braid four strands together. Basically, you take the strand on the far right and weave it under, over, then under the other three strands. As I was braiding, I was reminded of those pot holders we used to weave as kids. This thought did not cheer me on.

After completing the braid, I now have a thin, tight strip, nothing at all like the cute scarf in the tutorial. Maybe it wants to be a belt? The strap for a tote bag?